Why girls are outclassing boys at school

The Economist reports:

Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way. Policymakers who once fretted about girls’ lack of confidence in science now spend their time dangling copies of “Harry Potter” before surly boys. Sweden has commissioned research into its “boy crisis”. Australia has devised a reading programme called “Boys, Blokes, Books & Bytes”. In just a couple of generations, one gender gap has closed, only for another to open up.

So it is a global issue, not just a NZ issue.

The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all 64 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling.

That’s a huge difference.

To see why boys and girls fare so differently in the classroom, first look at what they do outside it. The average 15-year-old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spends more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys.

So parents need to make reading cool for boys.

Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it. They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a “waste of time”, and more often turn up late. Just as teachers used to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement. “There are different pressures on boys,” says Mr Yip. “Unfortunately there’s a tendency where they try to live up to certain expectations in terms of [bad] behaviour.”

Gender stereotypes for most of our history have worked against women, but now gender stereotypes in education are working against boys and men.

Perhaps because they can be so insufferable, teenage boys are often marked down. The OECD found that boys did much better in its anonymised tests than in teacher assessments.

Discrimination on the basis of gender?

What is behind this discrimination? One possibility is that teachers mark up students who are polite, eager and stay out of fights, all attributes that are more common among girls. In some countries, academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour. Another is that women, who make up eight out of ten primary-school teachers and nearly seven in ten lower-secondary teachers, favour their own sex, just as male bosses have been shown to favour male underlings.

The lack of male teachers is a concern.

Girls’ educational dominance persists after school. Until a few decades ago men were in a clear majority at university almost everywhere (see chart 2), particularly in advanced courses and in science and engineering. But as higher education has boomed worldwide, women’s enrolment has increased almost twice as fast as men’s. In the OECD women now make up 56% of students enrolled, up from 46% in 1985. By 2025 that may rise to 58%.

At 60%, there would be 50% more women than men in tertiary education.

Social change has done more to encourage women to enter higher education than any deliberate policy. The Pill and a decline in the average number of children, together with later marriage and childbearing, have made it easier for married women to join the workforce. As more women went out to work, discrimination became less sharp. Girls saw the point of study once they were expected to have careers. Rising divorce rates underlined the importance of being able to provide for yourself. These days girls nearly everywhere seem more ambitious than boys, both academically and in their careers.

The mass entrance of women into the workforce and higher education is one of the great trends of the 20th century. Now the challenge is to ensure boys are not left behind educationally.

Harriet

The mass entrance of women into the workforce and higher education is one of the great trends of the 20th century. Now the challenge is to ensure boys are not left behind educationally.

That’s too broad a statement as the standards of education have changed and they favour women – specialisation – like the social sciences and the ‘softer areas’ of medicine. There is nothing wrong with that, I believe it is good – but you are comparing apples with oranges as boys haven’t up until now had as much opportunity at specialisation eg. Office girls went through the ranks as technology increased – a cost saver – that’s not an ‘education’.

…the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement.

Yeah, good luck with that in this country. Just admit failure now and avoid chucking taxpayers’ money at it – NZ’s anti-intellectualism is so deeply ingrained you couldn’t get rid of it and still call the place New Zealand.

Cassius Dundee

nasska

I wonder if the success of girls over boys isn’t a reflection of the animal society we are at the apex of.

For example, lions & dogs live in groups where the females bear & raise the young while providing the food through hunting. About all the male does is fight with other males to determine who will be successful in passing on his genes.

It’s possible that we’re not quite as advanced a society as we like to think.

Harriet

box345

Just look at those pictures of blissful lion males lazing in the warm sun, while the females do all the hunting, cub-rearing and housekeeping. Try telling those kings-of-the-jungle that there’s a need to go out and work harder. It’s exactly the same with our young male youths. Kiwis despise and constantly berate (e.g.) John Key’s success. So what do we expect? Our projeny to work harder towards something hateful? We reap what we sow.
(Edit: snap nasska)

It’s more than just reading. When liberals and feminists starting having influence in the classroom, they skewed teaching methods so that they aimed towards the way females learn. I had several articles on this that I can’t put my hand on now.

Professor Christopher Cornwell at the University of Georgia has found that a heavily feminist-driven education paradigm systematically favours girls and disadvantages boys from their first days in school.

Examining student test scores and grades of children in kindergarten through fifth grade, Cornwell found that boys in all racial categories are not being “commensurately graded by their teachers” in any subject “as their test scores would predict.”

The answer lies in the way teachers, who are statistically mostly women, evaluate students without reference to objective test scores. Boys are regularly graded well below their actual academic performance.

Boys are falling significantly behind in grades, “despite performing as least as well as girls on math tests, and significantly better on science tests.”

After fifth grade, he found, student assessment becomes a matter of “a teacher’s subjective assessment of the student’s performance,” and is further removed from the guidance of objective test results. Teachers, he says, tend to assess students on non-cognitive, “socio-emotional skills.” This has had a significant impact on boys’ later achievement because, while objective test scores are important, it is teacher-assigned grades that determine a child’s future with class placement, high school graduation and college admissibility.

Eliminating the factor of “non-cognitive skills…almost eliminates the estimated gender gap in reading grades,” Cornwell found. He said he found it “surprising” that although boys out-perform girls on math and science test scores, girls out-perform boys on teacher-assigned grades.

stephieboy

Harriet ,

These is hardly a softer area of medicine ,

“..Women have increasingly participated in the medical workforce over time. Women have increased from 7% of registered doctors in the 1930s and only 8% in the early 1970s, to around 39% in 2008. In 2008, 46% of female doctors were under the age of 40 years, while only 28% of male doctors were under 40 – this reflects the trend towards more female than male medical students evident since the 1990s.

In 2008 women outnumbered men in vocational training for general practice (53%), obstetrics and gynaecology (74%), paediatrics (65%), pathology (63%) and public health medicine (67%). Areas where women were underrepresented were general surgery (35%), accident and emergency practice (25%), and orthopaedic surgery (5%),

All_on_Red

backster

I can’t see a problem myself certainly nothing to rush out and burn my undies over. Maybe if the females were forced to wear burkas conceal their flesh and follow behind the males the stats might start to even up.

The Bangles

About the statement:

Another one who still believes women should be confined to domestic duties ?

Maybe your not aware of it, but there was a time here in New Zealand, when one worker could provide for a family. I’m not saying that women shouldn’t have a choice as to whether they work in the house or not, however, some women work outside of the home cause they have to.

So while we like to use the term empowering women, more women having careers, the simple fact of the matter, is their was a time when one worker could provide for a family, now that’s no longer the case for most people, and we call it empowering women.

Anthony

Fletch, I have seen this kind of thing in the workplace with a woman manager. I am little slack about things I don’t really think are important. My female manager then says “look, you didn’t do this without being reminded so that means you don’t show any initiative in the workplace (implying I am a slacker who will get no pay rise this year).” She ignores all the other work I am doing and all the assistance I am giving my workmates. Not surprisingly, she has also moved some work from male team members to female (who I then have to assist).

Ed Snack

This is a result of a quite deliberate policy, followed in almost all western countries, to teach in ways that penalised males and rewarded females. And it’s cultural as well, in a number of the various sub-cultural milieus in NZ (and other countries) it is not culturally acceptable for males to be studious. Note that in the cultural contexts where is IS not not acceptable but expected, males do not have the same imbalance.

But in NZ subjects are quite deliberately taught in ways that emphasizes language skills over mathematical skills, ever come across a mathematics question that required an essay style answer ?

This issue won’t be properly dealt with until the current entire top level of the educational establishment is fired and new people with non-anti patriarchal philosophies brought in. The current people don’t see a problem, after all, they are getting exactly the results they want in their drive to overturn society as we know it. Unachieving boys are just an “unfortunate” but necessary side effect to them.

Frankly it is about time that females did a bit more to contribute to mankind’s on-going development. History has shown them to have been passengers thus far.

As for the education issue, I would not worry that much about it, most females end up doing minor and inconsequential work such as domestic duties. Men will always hold most of the top jobs and the few that go the way of females are almost always ceremonial with the real work being done by men.

By and large female should stick to what they are good at, cooking, cleaning and spending their husbands money.

Kimble

Now the challenge is to ensure boys are not left behind educationally.

Women are out-earning men in the younger cohorts in the UK.

You never hear about THAT though. All you constantly hear is about how there aren’t enough women CEO’s, how workplaces are oh so sexist, about BULLSHIT gender wage gaps that exist only thanks to statistical ignorance, and how everyone should be forced to hire more women in top paying jobs.

No complaints that there aren’t enough female garbage collectors though. Feminists only want equality in the places they WANT equality.

dime

Fentex

academic points can even be docked for bad behaviour.

I think the strongest clue is in this assertion. Big schools were created to train disciplined workers for industrial economies and as they occupy a great deal of children’s life and time continue to impose that discipline no matter what other purpose they think they serve.

As women increasingly succeed within the system and men get upset they are no longer privileged (the system hasn’t changed, men have lost their privilege, woman have not been granted new ones over them) it turns out the system doesn’t work so well for unprivileged males where masculine tendencies to assert oneself and independence are suppressed – they have always been suppressed in these systems but it didn’t use to matter when all the space women might have had was available.

Now women have taken their own space by succeeding within the system as privileges for men have passed away and now the conflict between regimentation, submission and masculine roles is revealed, I suspect.

SGA

nasska at 10:19 am

I wonder if the success of girls over boys isn’t a reflection of the animal society we are at the apex of.
For example, lions & dogs live in groups where the females bear & raise the young while providing the food through hunting. About all the male does is fight with other males to determine who will be successful in passing on his genes.

Cross-species comparisons are always tricky. If we look at the other great apes, our closest ‘relatives’ – gorillas have harems, chimps live in communes, orangutans are semi-hermits, not sure about gibbons 🙂 . (Ok, those descriptioons are a bit ‘loose’, but close enough to illustrate what I mean.)

PJM

Psycho Milt wrote:

“…the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement.

Yeah, good luck with that in this country. Just admit failure now and avoid chucking taxpayers’ money at it – NZ’s anti-intellectualism is so deeply ingrained you couldn’t get rid of it and still call the place New Zealand.”

My wife taught at Dilworth School (an all-boys private all-boarding no-fee school owned and run by the Dilworth Trust, in Auckland) from 1973 through 1982 and every year we went to the annual prizegiving ceremony. We derive much pleasure from continuing to do so, and have hardly missed a year since 1973. At the beginning, the general attitude of most of the boys
was much the same as I remembered from my days at Whangarei Boys’ High School in the 1950s — just as described in the article.

However, over the years the standard of achievement of Dilworth boys has gone up and up, while the ethnic mix now really is a representative sample of Auckland’s current population. The applause of the boys at the end-of year prizegiving is just as great, if not greater, for the academic and cultural prizes as it is for the awards for achievement at sport. Dilworth boys now expect to be high achievers and act accordingly — a real credit to the principal and staff — all ably supported by the Board of Trustees of the extremely benevolent Dilworth Trust.

New Zealand needs many more schools just like Dilworth, so come on, all you multi-millionaires and billionaires!

Paulus

How many men did not return from WW11 ? A huge number in population relative terms.
Women took over many of these men’s duties and this has continued unabated.
This shows up in the mainly female teaching “profession”, some with outlandish so called qualification.
I wonder how many “educated” women will find jobs to which they aspire ?
For example, I have heard from family juniors that they all want to be lawyers, but without family legal connections they will not find the jobs to which they aspire academically.
Worth watching over the next generation.

wiseowl

Ed has summed it up very well.
In NZ the education system is stuffed .Taken over by liberals and feminists.
Quite frankly society has been turned upside down .Women are taking over every area in the work force and so much positive discrimination .Especially local government and government where we all have to be so pc.
Women would be better off bringing up the kids in a strong relationship with the male the bread winner.
Watch the down ticks flow .

Huevon

This issue will become. ..academic.

All Western states are actively pursuing social degeneration on a massive scale. The low IQ, feckless, spendthrift feral underclass is out breeding the productive class at an alarming rate. We are mass importing uneducated third world migrants to replace our dwindling population.

The education system is a fraud. Grades are inflated, cheating is rampant, many years wasted being indoctrinated in universities to perform relatively menial jobs.

There are no new discoveries or technological breakthroughs. Antibiotics, flight, indoor plumbing, electricity, and so on were all created (by men) decades ago. Today the forefront of new technology is focused on trivial dating apps, entertainment and computer programs to make doing your accounts a little bit easier. There has been a documented decline in IQ levels in developed countries over the 20th century.

Huevon

Boris Piscina

“All Western states are actively pursuing social degeneration on a massive scale. The low IQ, feckless, spendthrift feral underclass is out breeding the productive class at an alarming rate. We are mass importing uneducated third world migrants to replace our dwindling population.”

– well get out and get rooting then. You’re absolutely correct, but unless you’re part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

Shitty bums and sleepless nights and empty wallets and paint on the TV and scratches on the car and no ability to go to the pub or out for a meal are all part of the price we have to pay in order that our civilisation has a future. 2.11 live births per female is the breakeven point for any society intent on merely replacing itself, never mind growing. Not so long ago six kids per family was standard. Then it was four. Then three. Now, in too many cases it’s two or even zero.

Too many in this country and others like us have no sense of duty anymore. Maybe getting rid of things like national service was a bad idea.

Rightandleft

As a teacher I can make some observations on this. First of all this isn’t something new. There were concerns about boys falling behind girls in the early Twentieth Century. However back then it didn’t matter as much because rules and society prevented girls from competing with boys at higher levels anyway. An important reason for the gap is differences in how the genders develop. Boys’ brains actually mature more slowly than girls, putting them about a year behind for most of their childhood. Some research suggests boys should be started a year later at school, not learning to read until age 7.

The problem is that many boys are not mentally ready for school at age 5 or 6 and thus they fail. This early failure gets them into a pattern where they expect to fail or become disillusioned with school. Many European nations don’t have kids start primary school until age 7 for this reason.

Another physical difference is that boys gross motor skills mature more quickly than girls, making them more coordinated at sport. Girls fine motor skills develop more quickly, making them better at writing at a younger age.

At high school level boys do better with clear rules, no open-ended assignments and competition being encouraged. Boys do learn differently and some co-ed schools have been experimenting with boys-only classes as a result.

As far as behaviour though I would disagree that girls are much better behaved or more polite than boys and that biases teachers against boys. On the contrary my experience has been that boys are more hyperactive and immature but much more likely to simply admit it when they’ve broken a rule and accept the punishment. Girls are generally much nastier when they are bullies and can take it to a level boys generally won’t go to.

But I also find girls are always the perfectionists, the ones who go above and beyond on a project and put in hours upon hours of work. Boys tend to be far more relaxed about assignments and need regular check-ins to ensure they do any work at all. It’s a double-edged sword though as it is the girls who end up with major stress disorders.

The Bangles

Well Boris, the solution is coming on its way by itself. Ever heard of self employment. Years ago, if you wanted to publish a book, you’d have to get approval from a publisher. Now with ebook technology this is no longer the case. What about programming a game. Years ago you’d have to type in lines of code. But thanks to technology, that’s no longer the case:

So the change in technology means their is less administration work out there, but it means creating things is easier than ever to do. So if college students would just find this out, they may decide after school it would be a good idea to stay home and create things, cause as time goes as technology destroys more and more jobs, but opens the door for the creativity jobs, this is going to be inevitable. I would have made this an election issue, that I would only have voted for the party that would do the most about this issue. But then David Cunliffe said I’m ashamed to be a man. But really, why is no one else bringing this up. So my point is about self-employment, that with self-employment, you get exactly what you put in regardless of gender, gender makes no difference. So I would have been a part of the solution, until Cunliffe messed it up.

doggone7

“The lack of male teachers is a concern.”

Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Can you imagine all the bright, intelligent males lining up to be teachers? Now what would make them want to do that? Money? The high status teachers enjoy? The fact their knowledge, skills and experience would be appreciated? The feeling that their contribution would be valued?

gump

“Oh look, another feminist that thinks inequality only happens to women, and pointing out any inequality faced by men is harassment and misogyny.”

——————–

Haha no. It’s actually a comment on the hypocrisies of Kiwiblog when it comes to social inequality.

Whenever there is a discussion about economic inequality, kiwiblog commentators claim that social inequality is a consequence of a meritocracy. That poor people become and remain poor through lack of work or aptitude.

If that same logic was applied to education then they should logically conclude that boys are falling behind educationally because they too are lacking in work or aptitude.

The only difference is that in the latter case men are the less than equal group. I’m amused by the hypocrisy on display.

BananaLama

And women still can’t build anything worth a dam.

Go for a drive and count the number of things that women have built i say drive because you can still do that with one hand. Maybe the fault is that blue collar jobs that can take a lifetime to master are looked down upon by society instead of being regarded as something worthy of a career.

Scott

I wonder whether anyone in the higher realms of education actually cares about this. At my sons prize giving at Wairarapa college the NCEA results were clear – the boys were 10 to 20% behind the girls in pass rates. The dux was a girl as are almost every dux nowadays. With the exception of a some high flying Asian boys.
But I have a few ideas – recruit more male teachers, get rid of feminism, set up a commission to investigate the problem, get rid of feminism, more emphasis on exams, more competition, value men and maleness and cleanse our minds of feminism, which is a form of neo Marxism anyway. That would be a good start.

Scott (2,295 comments) says:
January 9th, 2016 at 9:54 pm
The dux was a girl as are almost every dux nowadays. With the exception of a some high flying Asian boys.
But I have a few ideas – recruit more male teachers, get rid of feminism, set up a commission to investigate the problem, get rid of feminism

Ah the refreshing ideals of one who is politically aligned with the likes of Tom Hunter and Kimble. Nice one guys, you’re on the right track.

burt

Penny shows us how much smarter girls are than boys. Penny has mega capital, a freehold house in our most expensive city, pays no tax and no rates. How many men can claim to have emulated an offshore corporate trading in NZ as well as Penny has.